The cast is off

September 1, 2014

The cast is off!

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 Well the biggest news is that I no longer have my cast!!!  Because we wrote so late last week, we showed up like 20 minutes late for the appointment, and sat there waiting to be let in for almost an hour, so it was probably about 7pm when he finally did take it off.  I have a couple videos that my companion filmed with my camera of him sawing it off, but I think the file is too big for me to send.  Phooey.  But yeah, after it was off, I couldn´t walk on it because it hurt to put pressure on it, so for a couple days he told me I´d have to use one crutch since it´s still healing and I wouldn´t be able to put pressure on it without it hurting like crazy.  By now I can walk without it pretty easily, but I still have a slight limp since I can´t put a whole lot of pressure on it still.  Sometimes I can even go up the stairs like a normal person, not going up one step at a time.  It´s really exciting.  

Well, not too much else happened this week until this weekend.  On Saturday, there was a ward activity that ended up being really good.  They had some grills going and music playing and people were playing soccer and basketball in the court.  They had some really good music; my companion and I were dying because we just wanted to sing and dance along.  Our investigator Eddy almost immediately on his arrival started helping out with the grilling, and ended up helping out the entire time.  His eyes hurt really badly from all the smoke, pobrecito.  That night was his baptism!!  He was really excited for it.  It all went really well.  The next day at church we had a scare because he was late (only by 5-10 minutes, but he HAD to be there for his confirmation), but with a lot of faith, prayer, and phone calls, he showed up and we sat down just in time for the opening prayer.  He got confirmed without any problems.

Yesterday afternoon my companion went to Guayaquil with the other hermana leader to go to consejo, so guess who´s 24-hour companions with Hermana Whitmore again?  Meeeeeee!! :D  We´ve been having a lot of fun.  Today we found some really really really cute artesania and I finally managed to successfully barter some stuff down (the guy was being ridiculous but he finally caved when we said we could find it somewhere else and started walking out--hehehe).  It´s been a good day.

I can´t believe that Raquel is going home so soon!  It feels like a million years since I´ve seen her.  She only writes me in Spanish whenever we do remember to write each other, and she uses a lot of Chilean slang that I don´t understand haha.  Soy ecuatoriana pues.  When you see her give her a big hug from me.  The time goes by so fast: I already have 9 months--that´s half my mission done.  It´s so strange.

I love you and everyone else in the family.  Yeah, it´s been difficult around here for a while, but this week in one of our zone meetings they talked about humility and I decided I needed to be more humble and accepting of the plan that God has for me.  I´m working on not murmuring so much--I want to be like Nephi, not like Laman and Lemuel.  It´s a process, but it helps. 

Love you all!  Besos y abrazos,

Hermana Iverson

The cast comes off today!!!!

August 25, 2014

found a red trombone today!! :D

The cast comes off today!!!!  At 5:30, in roughly an hour and a half.  I´ve been counting down the hours since Saturday (Saturday I hit one month with the cast).  Speaking of that though, I had an interesting afternoon on Friday.  We had just come back from our appointment with our investigator when the enfermeras called to ask where we were, if we were going to leave, and then what our exact address was.  Very mysterious.  Later the other hermanas we live with got home, and the enfermeras called them, and told them that basically President Torres was in Cuenca.  Our mission president had come from Guayaquil on his p-day--no one´s even allowed to call him on that day, unless you´re literally dying.  Right after, the zone leaders called to tell us that not only was he here, but he was coming to our house, so we had to clean up right now!  We started cleaning like madwomen.  We waited for more than an hour in our now immacculate house, when finally he came with the enfermeras.  He just came right in and talked to me alone with the enfermeras about my foot.  He said that he wants me to take calcium pills with vitamin d, and that I have to eat better and be really careful to not jump or do anything drastic with my foot after the cast comes off.  He was probably only there for 20 minutes, and then off he went.  It was so strange.  But kind of cool.  It´s nice having a doctor for your mission president.

Yesterday we almost had a heart attack, because our investigator, who needed to come that third time to be baptized this Saturday, didn´t show up to church!  We waited and waited, and finally after the first two hours ended and we called for the 100th time, he answered!  He raced down and was able to attend the sacrament meeting of the other ward, in Totoracocha (where I was before).  We went in with him, and since just that week they had taken out both of the hermanas there and no one there knew yet, everyone thought that we were the sister missionaries there now and that I´d come back!  It was kind of funny.  But yeah, really scary, but don´t worry folks; he´s getting baptized this week!

Well, I have to wrap up, we need to finish early to go to my appointment.  I love you all, and I really am happy that you all have had fun.  Last week it stopped bothering me to read about your trip, so don´t worry about it.  

Love you! 

Hermana Iverson

Another week in Cuenca

August 18, 2014

So this week was a little easier walking with the heel.  It still hurts a little bit, but about halfway through the week I just kind of stopped bringing my crutch around and now I´ll just walk by myself.  I think I probably should have brought my crutch with me today since we walked around a lot more than I thought we would, but I think I´ll be okay in the end.  I´m really excited because this week will be a month with the cast, so by next Monday I should be cast-free!!!!  I´m so excited to get it taken off.  *knock on wood*

Wednesday night we got a surprise: Hermana Adams got cambios!  We thought we´d be together until I got my cast off, but nope.  She just went to the other zone in Cuenca, to the Tarqui Ward.  This is funny because we literally share a border with Tarqui, so she barely went very far at all.  It was a trade-off: she went to Tarqui, and one of the hermanas from Tarqui came here.  My new companion is Hermana Espíritu.  That´s right, her name is literally Sister Spirit.  She´s from Peru and has 16 months in the mission.  She´s really fantastic and I´m glad to be companions with her.  I´ve heard about her a lot, since she was in Alamos for 6 months and I got there two months after she left.  She´s probably the oldest sister in the mission, at 30 years old, but she´s only been a member for 3 years.  She´s super nice and understanding, so that´s great, especially with the whole cast/being ridiculously sick this whole weekend situation.  

Oh yeah, so I started to get sick the day that Hermana Adams left (she had been sick for a week), and within two days I got really bad.  I had a really bad cough with headaches and a runny nose and everything hurt--the whole package.  By Sunday, it got so bad that I just slept all afternoon but still felt really bad.  Today I´m a little bit better, but my head still kind of hurts, and my nose is still runny, and I still have a cough--but I don´t cough that frequently now!  I´ve kind of just accepted now that if something can happen, it will.

Welp, that´s pretty much all that happened this week.  I´m trying not to be so down, but it gets really tiring to hear everybody tell you to be positive about the situation. But I´m doing the absolute best that I can.  Been praying and reading the scriptures a lot, that´s for sure.

Well, I´ll talk to you later.  Love you all!

Love,
Hermana Iverson

p.s. Almost forgot!  Saturday night there was going to be a baptism at the chapel, but there wasn´t water (don´t ask, I´m not sure) so we had to go to the stake center, which is in Tarqui.  A little girl in our ward was going to be baptized, and we had taught her a few lessons and were close to her family (her aunt and her uncle are two strong families in the ward).  Hna. Adams was so sad to miss it, but then we ended up seeing her there!  She was so excited.

well this week was una vaina

August 11, 2014

Me being super frustrated and angry after having the heel put on

wooooo got to go in the cart again

So the only really exciting thing that happened this week was that the tacón (heel) got put onto my cast!  It was really annoying, because we were supposed to have had it done on Wednesday, and the enfermeras even called us to tell us that the hospital said that the doctor was there in the morning and that everything was fine, but then after going all the way over there (the hospital is in the other zone) we sat and waited for a loooooong time before a nurse came out and finally told us that the doctor we were waiting to see wasn´t even there!  He was working in a different hospital that morning and wouldn´t be there until the afternoon.  So she gave the enfermeras his number to call him and make an appointment, but they were being kind of flojas about calling and getting in to see him that day, so we had to wait until Thursday.  It was especially annoying because we spent almost $5 in taxis for nothing.  They got us an appointment Thursday night with him, at like 6:30pm.  So we go to his office, which is in a building right across the street from the hospital, and we have to pay $25 for the consultation fee.  We walk into his office, and he says "Well, we were going to put a heel on it, right?  You can go the the clinica across the street to go buy it.  Here´s a little paper with what you need."  Lame.  So we go across the street to buy the stuff.  He made us buy not only the heel, which wouldn´t have been that expensive, but also the special bandage stuff to put it on AND his gloves, all of which added up to another $25.  The man is a doctor and he doesn´t have his own gloves there in his office?  Grrr.  So we go back, and he starts putting the heel onto my cast.  Now it wasn´t a normal, functional, logical contraption.  It wasn´t like a boot, or even a shoe-sole kind of thing that would cover the whole bottom of my foot.  It was a giant 2"x3"x1.5" rubber block, uncomfortably placed far back towards my heel.  It´s got to be one of the stupidest looking things I´ve ever seen.  The doctor told me that I still have to use one crutch on my other side to walk.  It´s like, what is even the point of having this thing?  My companion, Hermana Adams, was literally sitting there watching the whole time with the funniest look on her face, of total shock and disbelief, like "What the heck is going on?!  What is he doing?!?"  She even asked him where he studied hahaha (luckily latinos tend to not notice sarcasm a lot).  I was so mad.  As we were leaving his office, we were both half yelling about how dumb this thing was.  When we got home, all of the hermanas were already home, since the hermanas in Azogues always get home early and the other hermanas have had to stay inside too since one of them is sick.  Two of the hermanas left to get pizza, and I sat in bed yelling with my companion at the ones that were still there about how ridiculous my stupid heel was and how I wanted to rip it off.  I just wanted to sit and scream, I was so frustrated.  I´ve just been using both crutches since then, because it hurts me to just use the one and walk on the heel.  My foot hadn´t been hurting at all, and then he put that on and it hurts every time I walk on it.  I´m hoping when my mission president sees the photos we sent him he´ll let me take it off.  We´ll see.

Other than that...not really anything else happened this week.  We´ve just been hanging out, leaving for an hour every day.  I´ve written a lot of letters.  Oh, that reminds me, I got another card from the Poelmans!  It was from Miho.  I thought it was funny that I´ve gotten more mail from them than I do from my own family.

Yup, that´s my life right now.  Kind of really frustrating.  Every time something happens and I get sad or upset or frustrated about it, by the time I finally accept it and am okay with it and am handling things with a better attitude, something even worse happens.  I´m not a fan of this cycle.  Pero solo hay que seguir adelante.  No puedo perderme la fe, o realmente me volveré loca.

Love,

Hermana Iverson

this week was really boring, but I still wrote a lot about it...yup

August 4, 2014

To answer your questions, I didn´t exactly break my foot so much as fracture it.  It´s actually a tiny little fracture, but I ended up with the big whole cast.  Kind of annoying.  We were going crazy being inside this week, because the nurses kept giving us weird excuses from the mission president as to why we couldn´t go outside, stuff like that he was afraid that my cast would break if I walked on it.  ...but I don´t walk on it, because I have my crutches.  I have crutches so that I don´t walk on it.  And either way, the fact that it would break is just ridiculous.  We were getting frustrated, so finally on Wednesday afternoon (a week after I fell) I called my mission president to see what was really going on.  I was kind of terrified, but I knew that he wouldn´t get mad at me because he is practically charity personified and would just answer my questions, but I was still scared to call.  But I did it!  It was kind of funny because at first I got nervous and just asked him why exactly I couldn´t go outside, and he was just like, "Well...you have a cast, right?" Well you´ve got a good point there, but still.  But after we talked for a few minutes, he told me that if I really wanted to and if I thought I could handle it, we could leave for an hour that day to see how it went.  So we went out for an hour, not really sure who to talk to since we lost our only progressing investigators the week before.  We ended up finding this one guy and after talking to him for a little bit, he accepted a date for baptism!  We were so happy when we got home.  It was exactly what we needed.  Ever since then, the nurses have been letting us go out for an hour every day.  Victory is mine.  We even got to go to all of church yesterday, so everyone in Totoracocha (where I was 2.5 months ago) saw me in my cast with my crutches.  I should have counted how many times I told people "¡Me caí!" upon them asking what happened.  My convert Yinson saw me and was freaking out.  It was kind of funny.  My favorite reaction though was from one sister who we had visited in her house.  When I was there, she was recovering from a torn tendon or something and couldn´t leave her house very often, and after a while only left to go to church in crutches.  Now she walks around totally fine without any help, but when she saw me in my crutches and my cast, she just started laughing because it was so funny how we had just switched spots.  That was entertaining.

Since this is the first Monday of the month, my companion (being the hermana leader) went to Guayaquil with the other hermana leader and the zone leaders for consejo with presidente, so I´ve been with the other hermana leader´s companion: Hermana Whitmore!!  I´ve been really excited to be 24-hour companions with her.  She´s my best buddy here in the mish.  Today we made oreo balls and bought stuff to make s´mores, and Hna. Whitmore made fresh orange juice because as we were leaving the house today there was this truck outside our house selling 25 oranges for $1!!!!  We couldn´t pass it up.  

My foot is doing fine and doesn´t hurt me at all (I´m not even taking medicine because it´s not necessary) so don´t worry about me.  I´m getting a heel/boot thing put on my cast on Wednesday so that I can walk on it!  Just two more days with crutches!!!  Yessssss.

But yeah, nothing else really going on right now.  Love you lots and hope you´re all doing well. 

Love you and talk to you next week,

Hermana Iverson

p.s. we went grocery shopping today and they gave me a motorized cart to use and it was awesome--but it would beep as it would go in reverse so I did everything I could to not have to go backwards

So I kind of fell...

July 28, 2014

Soooooo...this week was definitely more interesting than the cows.  It started out with Hermana Whitmore and her new companion coming last Monday to be the first hermanas in Azogues, the city about an hour north of us that´s in our zone.  They´ve been living with us since they still don´t have a house, but I don´t mind.  Hermana Whitmore and I are bffs from when we lived together for two months in Santa Rosa.  She can stay as loooooong as she wants.  But yeah, the week was pretty normal until Wednesday rolled around...

It all started after lunch.  We had gone to Santa María del Vergel, the far end of our sector up in the hills.  We had gone off of the main paved road onto a dirt road to go visit a less active family that lived there.  I´ve probably walked down this dirt road at least a dozen times in the two weeks I had been here, and it barely slopes downhill at all.  It was not steep at all.  But here I am, walking as usual, when my foot suddenly twists weirdly underneath me and I instantly fall to the ground.  I literally just laid there for several seconds just wondering how I even fell.  There was literally nothing there.  But I scraped my left knee pretty badly, and my right foot, that I had fallen on, really really hurt.  So we limped the 40-50 yards or so to this member´s house to clean up my knee.  After that when I realized that it hurt way too much to walk, we called the nurses and they told me to elevate my foot and ice it for 20 minutes.  So we went inside the house, and the abuelita brings me some frozen peas and goes to get the abuelito.  The abuelito walks into the room where I´m lying on the couch, and suddenly he thinks he´s an experienced doctor that knows exactly what he´s doing.  He started feeling up my foot, asking where it hurt, and when I nearly screamed as he pressed where it hurt the most, he just kept massaging that exact spot, saying it was necessary.  So I´m lying on the couch, dying, yelping in pain, and my companion was just like, "Uh, hermano, maybe we shouldn´t do that...maybe you could just leave it be..." but he kept at it.  His accent is so thick that no one can understand him, but the abuelita explained to us that he thought these two bones in my foot were dislocated, and that if we pushed them back into place, it would stop hurting.  We were almost completely positive that was not the correct solution, but he was convinced that that was what it was.  Then all of a sudden he started getting ready to "push them back in" and we started to freak out.  Hermana Adams got up and was trying to stop him, saying "Hermano I really think that we shouldn´t do this...we´re just gonna go to a hospital and have a doctor look at this hermano please STOP."  Between her and the abuelita, they convinced him to call a taxi and to just let it be, but then he just pressed the ice onto my foot and it hurt really bad.  Although I was in a ton of pain, it was actually extremely funny the whole situation.

We got a taxi back to the house (the taxi driver spoke perfect English, which really threw us off at first, but it was super cool and we talked to him about the gospel and it was super spiritual and neat), and then from there the nurses told us to go the emergency room.  We went, and they took some X-rays and lo and behold: I had fractured a bone in my foot.  The solution?  They put my foot in a cast.  After that, we had to wait two hours to leave the hospital because the mission was having trouble paying since I had come back so recently that they still hadn´t put me back on the insurance yet, but we eventually left at 9 o´clock at night.  The next morning the nurses dropped off some crutches, and we´ve just been staying in the house ever since.  I´ve only had permission from the mission president to go to the first hour of church yesterday, and today I could only leave to write.  It´s been rough.  We´re pretty sure we´re going to die from being inside for so long.  My companion has washed every piece of clothing she owns, it seems.  Worse, today there are cambios, so we´ll see if we stay here or not.  I think we might, since I can´t really go anywhere or carry two giant suitcases, but who knows.  I really don´t want to leave, and I really want to go out and work.  It´s been hard.

The worst part of all of this?  While we were in the hospital on Wednesday, the family that we´ve been teaching, this single mom with her two kids, texted us saying that they no longer wanted to listen to us and were going to stay with their religion.  Her son was going to get baptized this past Saturday, three days after.  She and the daughter were going to get baptized in a few weeks.  The next night, Hermana Adams went with Hermana Whitmore and the zone leaders to go talk to them, and I guess the mom´s parents called and said some really really bad things about the church and since she was afraid of her parents (a grown woman who takes care of her own family), she just decided she didn´t want to know more.  We had been teaching them for a month, before I even got there.  The son who was getting baptized was crying, this 14-year-old kid, because he really wanted to be baptized.  It was awful.  She knows this is the truth too, but nope.  It was really upsetting.  So now we have no investigators, which is actually kind of a good thing because we couldn´t visit them if we had them anyway.  Yupppp.

I don´t want you to worry about me, I´m doing fine.  My foot actually doesn´t hurt me at all, and personally I think Presidente is overreacting just a teeeeeeny bit.  But gotta be obedient, no matter how frustrating and upsetting it is.  But don´t worry about me, I´m going to be fine.  I´ll only have a cast for a month, two weeks with crutches and two weeks with a...heel thing that I can walk with (I don´t know how to translate with the doctor said).  I´ve gotten pretty good at walking with crutches, so I should be fine.  

I love you all and think about you even more than usual (since I literally have nothing else to do this whole week).  Take care,

Love,

Hermana Iverson

Chútica I forgot how cold it gets here

July 21, 2014

So this week wasn´t as exciting as last week...but it had its moments.  Mostly this week was spent trying to find people and them not being home.  That are continually having people tell us they weren´t interested when the Spirit in the room was so strong you could have cut it with a knife.  Like after one lesson with very nice, very faithful woman who was very not interested in the Church even after that very spiritual lesson, I said to my companion: "I´m really tired of watching people deny the Spirit."  Pero la plena, that´s been happening all week.  I had that challenge to talk to 100 people a day, and even though I never even got anywhere close to that number (10 was our record), we were still really working hard to put ourselves out there and try and talk to as many people as we could.  We were teaching people all the time, but none of them have progressed.  It´s been really frustrating, especially when the only people we do find that are interested in listening to us don´t live in our sector.  Our sector is huge, but how it works is that the people we find either don´t live here or are barely home if they do live here.  Yup.  

But other than that, I like my sector.  It´s really pretty here in Cuenca, and it´s neat because we have part of the city center in our sector.  Do you remember when I took a picture in front of that cathedral and sent a picture way back in April?  That was the Cathedral San Blas, and that is now in my sector.  Pretty cool.

Katie & Hermana Adams trying to stay warm

I really don´t know what else to talk about.  Nothing else overly interesting happened this week, just little funny things here and there.  Like how on Wednesday we were at a less active member´s house, and we were sitting in a room right off the main gate, and in the middle of the lesson as I happened to look outside the door (I was sitting closest to it) at their mini-yard in front of the gate, there were suddenly a bunch of cows passing right through the gate toward the back of the house.  It was so unexpected that it scared me, and I jumped about half a foot in the air, and I might have even yelled, I don´t remember very well.  I just remember it scared me so badly hahaha.  I scared my companion and everyone else in the room and everyone burst out laughing at my reaction as four cows were ushered by the abuelita to the back of the property.  By the time we finally all calmed down and the cows were gone, exactly at that moment there was a loud mooing right outside the door, and it scared me even worse this time.  I remember, that time I did scream, and made my companion scream because I had screamed.  As we broke out laughing even harder, the member mentioned that there were in fact five cows.  Kind of figured that out the hard way haha.

Katie's Zone

Any other stories...welp on Saturday we tried carrying a box of copies of the Book of Mormon from our zone meeting to our house (the chapel was like a less than 10-minute walk away), and Hermana Adams, my companion, was carrying it.  It was really heavy, so we tried sharing it by balancing it using her jacket as a hammock thing, but it wasn´t working.  I put down my end to try and balance it, but she ended up with most of the weight, and since she didn´t have it balanced either, she dropped the (heavy) box right on my big toe.  Needless to say, after laughing for several minutes, she continued carrying it as I limped the whole way home.  It got better and stopped hurting though, so don´t worry.

But yeah, nothing else to report.  I miss you all and I hope you´re all doing well.  I can´t believe it´s already been almost two weeks since I left.  Feels like I just got here.  Time goes by so fast here in the mission.  I´m so so so so so happy to be back though.  I didn´t realize how much I truly missed it.  This is where I feel I belong.  

Love you all,

Hermana Iverson

p.s. Oh!  Almost forgot.  We went and picked up two hermanas from the bus terminal this afternoon.  They´re going to put hermanas in Azogues, the town about an hour north of us.  There have only been elders there, so that´s exciting!  Even better is that one of them is Hermana Whitmore, whom I lived with in Santa Rosa for two months and we be tight.  Love that girl. :)

Saw this in el centro today--I really love English mistakes here hahaha.  But really my companion and I were laughing so hard when we saw this haha.